AskHistorians requires that answers reflect current academic, peer-reviewed scholarship on the topics under consideration. Where there is a scholarly consensus, that means we require posts to observe it, even if the individual user disagrees. Where there is a historiographical dispute in peer-reviewed scholarship or where the poster in question disagrees with a theory or view, often times they will note the different perspectives and explain why the disjunction exists. "Peer-reviewed" is as close as you're going to get to a definition of 'mainstream', I think.

I've also compared AH historians to the "academic demographics" of the profession in this earlier thread, if you're interested.

For example, I am under the impression that in general, users here reject the conflict hypothesis. Am I correct to assume that in general, the larger academia would reject it, too?

Historians of science definitely reject the conflict thesis. Would "the larger academia reject it, too?" It depends on who that is — if that means non-historians of science, maybe not. But among historians of science, the conflict thesis is known to be totally false.

Speaking as a former flaired contributor (under previous account u/tfrauline) and a working academic in 18th century literature, I think AH contributors are by and large pretty good about assessing the current state of knowledge on the topics they respond to.

However, AH is still very much subject to the huge demographic bias that occurs across reddit. Here's a 2016 Pew research center study of reddit's demographics, which determined that 70% of users are male, and 59% of all users are between the ages of 18-29. This obviously isn't AH's fault but as far as I've seen on both sides of the contributor/asker divide the subreddit is still very much subject to this bias.

What this means as that the responses and discussions here are typically not coming from older more established contributors (particularly senior academics) and women contributors. These are two extremely important/large demographics within academic circles and therefore this does have an impact on the type of answers your getting. This is less about how valid the answers you get are, but more the angle or perspective of the question or answer.

For example: there are a dearth of strong gender studies expertise in this subreddit which impacts the general tone of response to questions about historical sexuality or sexual practice. It's not that any of the answers you get are "wrong", far from it, but you'd get very different responses from a well-established women professor.

edit: I've since reassessed this particular section related to gender studies after reviewing some AH answers. See my comment here

This doesn't mean AH isn't a fantastic subreddit, probably the best reddit has to offer. Readers should just be aware of the website's demographic bias across every subreddit. It's part of the reason I've tried to ease off my usage of the site for anything other than entertainment.

Can I ask what is meant by "conflict hypothesis?"